With the release of Windows Server 2012, there comes a lot of new features and one in particular is of great interest to Bit Refinery. This new feature is called Deduplication and allows a tremendous savings in storage to be realized. With users storing more and more data, having this technology available will reduce our customers monthly storage costs up to 60%!
There are places where this new technology should be used and there are places where it should be used. Let’s cover the details here:
- Great for file shares, OS deploy files and backup files
- Not great for Exchange and SQL databases along with Hyper-v hosts VMs
- The system volume/drive (C:) is not supported
- A heavy file share system caused a 10% performance hit
We set up a quick test. On a fresh Windows 2012 Standard Server, we copied the .ISO file onto the server then made 2 copies of it. We also copied a few random text files from the Internet:
Before deduplication is turned on, the volume looked like this:
Then after we turned deduplication on:
Although this was a very rudimentary test, it does show some pretty good storage savings.
Contact us if you have any questions on migrating or installing Windows 2012. Bit Refinery’s VMware cloud supports Windows 2012 Standard.
Here is a great video from the Technet site on Windows Server 2012 Deduplication:
( Direct link if video doesn’t come up. Silverlight…)